ne worship, with
punishment on those who favour it. Then this holy seat will be full of
idolatry, idols' temples, and dead men's tombs. O Egypt, Egypt, there
shall remain of thy religion but vague stories which posterity will
refuse to believe, and words graven in stone recounting thy piety. The
Scythian, the Indian, or some other barbarous neighbour shall dwell in
Egypt. The Divinity shall reascend into the heaven; and Egypt shall be a
desert, widowed of men and gods."

The spread of Christianity among the Egyptians was such that their
teachers found it necessary to supply them with a life of Jesus, written
in their own language, that they might the more readily explain to
them his claim to be obeyed, and the nature of his commands. The Gospel
according to the Egyptians, for such was the name this work bore, has
long since been lost, and was little quoted by the Alexandrians. It was
most likely a translation from one of the four gospels, though it had
some different readings suited to its own church, and contained some
praise of celibacy not found in the New Testament; but it was not valued
by the Greeks, and was lost on the spread of the Koptic translation of
the whole New Testament.

The grave, serious Christians of Upper Egypt were very unlike the lively
Alexandrians. But though the difference arose from peculiarities of
national character, it was only spoken of as a difference of opinion.
The Egyptians formed an ascetic sect in the church, who were called
heretics by the Alexandrians, and named Docetas, because they taught
that the Saviour was a god, and did not really suffer on the cross, but
was crucified only _in appearance_. They of necessity used the Gospel
according to the Egyptians, which is quoted by Cassianus, one of their
writers; many of them renounced marriage with, the other pleasures
and duties of social life, and placed their chief virtue in painful
self-denial; and out of them sprang that remarkable class of hermits,
monks, and fathers of the desert who in a few centuries covered Europe
with monasteries.

It is remarkable that the translation of a gospel into Koptic introduced
a Greek alphabet into the Koptic language. Though for all religious
purposes the scribes continued to use the ancient hieroglyphics, in
which we trace the first steps by which pictures are made to represent
words and syllables rather than letters, yet for the common purposes of
writing they had long since made use of the _e